Kimberly Steele

I’ve believed various things about dreams during my near half century in this life, and my beliefs have run the gamut from atheist dismissal of dreams as insignificant make-believe to the polytheist’s view of dreams as interaction with other human souls, spirits, entities, and gods on a plane that connects to our material one called the astral plane.  At the time of this writing, I fall solidly into the latter category.

When I was sixteen, as a churchgoing Christian Protestant, I experienced an intense run of night terrors.  Almost every night, I would drop into a twilight, not-quite-sleep state where I would see things lurking in my bedroom through the red haze of my eyelids.  A feeling of pressure accosted me as if I had a heavy weight on my chest.  Breathing was difficult.  Dark shapes amassed in corners and huddled against walls.  If the sights were terrifying, the sounds were worse.  I heard low hums of chorused voices that would rise in response to the small movements of my body.  One of the worst ones featured two malicious teenaged girls whispering in the corner of my room, plotting to assault me with a hammer.  Since I already suffered with depression at the time, I figured I was going crazy.  I have never known much more than my ethnicity because I was adopted shortly after being born, so due to my genetic wild cards, I suspected my night terrors heralded an early descent into paranoid schizophrenia.  

The Protestant church that had granted me confirmation a few years earlier had zero answers; I would have been an idiot not to know this and did not bother asking.  My inadequate study of the occult at that time did not help because I was too incompetent a researcher to seek out the right study materials and mentors.  I had no comprehension of dreams and the astral body at the time I desperately needed exactly that form of cold, non-superstitious understanding.  What follows is that which I believe I needed to hear at sixteen years old:

“If each human’s existence is likened to the Everlasting Gobstopper/Jawbreaker, the material plane is the sour candy shell on the outside.  One layer in, there is a different flavor called the etheric plane.  This plane of energy is what Chinese people call “chi” and Indians call “prana” and is what feng shui, acupuncture, and Ayurveda works with.  The etheric is invisible to us humans while we are awake in our stodgy plane, but some sensitive people can see it and most can feel it whether they realize it or not.  The next candy layer in is the astral plane, which is most easily understood as the world of dreams you go to when you sleep.  The dream world is part your own brain and part collective, meaning, other peoples’ dreams are part of your world/vice a versa and you can interact with them and they with you.  Dreams are not what you choose them to be: just like other people’s emotions or the weather, they aren’t controlled by the dreamer.  There are rules and limits to them just as there are rules and limits on the physical plane.  Of course these rules and limits are different than the ones on the physical plane.  The next layer in is the mental plane, which is the plane of learning and mastery that separates humans from other animals.  For instance, being able to figure out how fast an object falls to the ground because of scientific laws falls under the mental plane category.   Another layer into the Gobstopper is the spiritual plane, which is the primary reason you were incarnated and is the core from which all of the other layers of the Gobstopper emanate and cannot exist without.  Take note that all the planes are the same Gobstopper, they are just different layers of a whole candy.”

I needed a tutorial on the subtle bodies divorced from all traces of woo.  I needed to be told that night terrors weren’t all in my imagination.  I needed to be told that I wasn’t crazy, only depressed.  Of course medical professionals told me I was crazy and medicated me accordingly, which is why I fired them long ago.  Though I offer no advice to anyone else taking psychiatric drugs, I personally chose to stop taking medications, especially since the ones I was on tended to exacerbate my night terrors instead of stopping them.  

The Astral Plane as Nouns: Persons, Places, and Things

Of course no two human’s dreams are identical, nor are their perceptions of the astral plane, which is the separate-but-connected layer of the Gobstopper where dreams take place.  Furthermore, if each dream is as large as the being’s imagination that perceives it, we can describe the astral plane as infinite as far as our tiny brains are concerned because it is a collective of all dreams ever dreamed by sentient beings.  Additionally, it is at least a billion years old, just like animal life on Planet Earth.  

One of the few dependable traits of dreams is that humans dream of other humans, and unless you’re a truly unusual human, you are probably dreaming of people you know as well as deceased relatives, celebrities, non-human animals, and perhaps a fictional character every now and then for spice.  If the astral plane is full of people, including yourself, the next logical question is “Who are these people in dreams?”  Atheists, who do not believe in an astral plane even though they have no choice but to go there every time they sleep, will answer, “Those people are figments of the dreamer’s imagination.”  On the other hand, a credulous true-believer type will answer, “Those people have nothing to do with the dreamer’s imagination: they are one hundred percent real.”  

It is my opinion that the truth is somewhere in between the two extremes.  Some of the other people in dreams are absolutely only in your imagination and have absolutely nothing to do with any person, real or living, in the waking world.  Others are literally your dead relative who is trying to contact you to reassure you that it will all be fine and you needn’t tear your hair out over their death.  Others, and I suspect this is true of the majority, are a blend of your projections onto the screen of their essence, meaning a part of them that science has yet to understand is interacting with you and another part is all your perception of who they are.  If you have a particularly intense dream about someone, living or dead, my thoughts are that you should give it some deep self-analysis.  You might learn almost nothing about them by looking into why you dreamed about them, but you’ll learn almost everything about yourself.  

As for non-human characters, I dream about non-human animals all the time.  I know what they mean to me.  Animals frequently represent to me what children represent to parents.  Most of the animals I dream about are creatures of fantasy, for instance the giant wild dogs that populate my parents’ yard in dreams.  There are no wild dogs of that size in the Midwest.  If I dream of my cat, however, chances are she is part my imagination and part my actual cat projecting her astral presence from where she sleeps, which is usually on or near my legs.
 

When it comes to places that humans dream about, it begins to get truly interesting.  A simple online search will reveal entire communities talking about recurring dreams of a certain style of mall and a certain style of school.  Though malls and schools are part of the common waking experience, the uncanny part is that two or more dreamers from completely unrelated locations and backgrounds can describe the same layouts, store owners, and nitty gritty details about the astral plane mall as if it existed on the material plane.  Once again, the atheist chimes in with “oh come on, it’s all just a coincidence” yet the most cursory perusal of Jungian psychology would reveal an undeniable rabbit hole that would be positively un-scientific to ignore.  I too dream of the mall.  It’s a multi-story structure and it’s always in a state of closing; it is often only half lit because it is closing down.  It is often attached to a grocery store with a large apartment building nearby.  The school was once high school in my case and has now become perpetual college.  I’m never prepared and I have no class schedule, which I am instructed I must see a counselor on the first floor to obtain.  Meanwhile, I am missing one or more classes.  I often dream my parents have moved into a round or octagonal custom built open plan McMansion with far more seating areas and bedrooms than necessary for an old married couple.  This structure often has windows that view a shared wall with a conjoining building that is similarly deluxe.  I believe I dream of the mall because it exists in the collective consciousness of dreamers, especially dreamers in and from the US.  We are all going to the same mall, but unlike a physical mall, it is as huge as consciousness itself with inconceivable numbers of minute permutations.  When I dream of my parents’ house, I believe it’s mostly my emotional pictures of that place with a tiny bit of the “real” house and the spirits who dwell there mixed in.  

Speaking of spirits, I will now provide a trigger warning to any atheists still reading: if you are one of the many atheists who claims to be openminded but is actually no such thing, please surf away now and go back to your simple, comfortable blue pill world.  I was an atheist for a while and I am quite familiar with that world; it’s nice there and there are lots of select-a-size paper towels and neatly mowed lawns.  Nevertheless, magic does not require your belief in order to exist, and neither do angels, elementals, spirits of the dead, gods, or demons.  We wouldn’t want you to become frightened by things you are wholly determined not to believe in!  

Non-corporeal entities, otherwise known as spirits, are everywhere in all the planes, as are gods and demons.  Unlike on the material plane, we can see a great many more spirits on the astral plane, but the forms they take depend on our own perceptions.  Gods and angels can’t be understood by our primitive walking ape minds, so if they show themselves to us in dreams, it’s anyone’s guess what form they will take.  One ancient description of angels depicts them with four faces, for instance the Book of Ezekiel in the Bible which describes cherubim with the simultaneous faces of a man, eagle, ox, and lion.  For me, this description provides obvious representational symbolism of the four elements — man is water, eagle is air, ox is earth, and lion is fire — and not much else.  In The Exorcist’s Handbook, Josephine McCarthy hilariously describes angels as having autistic personalities: often excruciatingly literal.  Their appearance is whatever the human’s puny mind can handle.
 

Things in dreams, for instance, a window or an apple, are also maddeningly subjective.  To you, a window might represent an opportunity or a path to freedom.  For me, it might be an item made of glass and plastic that’s on sale at The Home Depot for $159 and nothing more.  For this reason, dream interpretation and books on that topic are pretty much useless.  Symbols and archetypes are deeply personal, and though we can talk about larger sociological trends to hint which ones are important, in the end it all comes down to the individual’s nature.  

One thing I have seen more than my fair share of in dreams is demons, especially in the old days before I knew about the Sphere of Protection, hoodoo baths, and prayer.  What does a demon look like?  Well, to me, they often pose as people I know, except they are off and deformed.  I call this type of demon an Impersonator.  Other forms are typical to horror movies: the classic Hag, ogres, disembodied hands.  As far as I can tell, the astral plane is absolutely infested with demons and malicious entities at the moment and it’s only getting worse.  This infestation is due to the murky state of people’s imaginations as they become increasingly removed from nature and more heavily influenced/corrupted by the poisonous media machine.  Industrialism has not been good for human consciousness, and if demons need to be invited in order to make a home, the mechanization of our fragile biosphere has rolled out the red carpet.
 

I hope the above gives you a remote idea of what I think dreams are made of (cues song by The Eurythmics).  One thing that is certain is that dreaming isn’t studied enough.  Our culture is ill-equipped to study human dreams, as there is the stupid belief in the revelatory potency of EEGs and brain scans with fun rainbow colors.  In my opinion, a culture that denies the existence of the astral plane as ours does cannot have any understanding of dreams, because dreams ARE the astral plane.  So for now, it’s up to occultists to figure out the astral plane, unless science decides to get a clue.

Reading List:
The Astral Body and Other Astral Phenomena by A.E. Powell
The Exorcist's Handbook by Josephine McCarthy
Psychic Self-Defense by Dion Fortune